Special issue of Post45, co-edited by Laura Bieger (Ruhr University Bochum) and Philipp Löffler (University of Heidelberg)
Deadline (abstracts): December 1, 2025
What happens when the present becomes historical to itself and the contemporary turns into a categorizable literary-historical formation? Is that even possible, that is: can the contemporary ever become historical (to) itself? This special issue seeks to examine the conditions that would allow us to understand the contemporary as a distinct literary period which began in the 1990s—with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of neoliberalism, and the growing sense that postmodern irony had outlived itself—and has now arguably come to an end. Not coincidentally, this was a period of almost uncontested, unipolar US political hegemony on a global scale. The contemporary, in other words, appears to be entangled variously with the post-historical, a constellation that was once proclaimed by G.W.F. Hegel and then powerfully reappropriated by Francis Fukuyama as the Cold War was about to end. This connection, we contend, is likely to be registered in literary production of the time.
Understanding the contemporary as period in and of itself is not meant to replace the common view of it as a singular moment signifying the immediate present. Rather, it seeks both to complement and complicate that view. In doing so, the proposed volume raises fundamental questions about the practice of writing literary history and about the function of the period as a meaningful structuring device within any such history. Within this historical and theoretical frame, we invite contributions that address one or several of the following questions and concerns:
- Historical Time and Storytelling: Following Edmund Husserl and other phenomenologists, the contemporary present can only be grasped through the differential between an immediate past and a projected future. In that, attempts to conceptualize the contemporary are dependent on relating past and future within a coherent narrative. In how far is the very production of the contemporary through story telling conditioned by historicist methodologies? Is the contemporary simply the most recent incarnation of literary history, demarcating a field that becomes meaningful only if it is understood as already closed and thus categorizable? And if so, what are the consequences of our historicist scholarly belatedness? What role do alternative methods such as ‘critical fabulation’ (Hartman) play in this production? In how has the rise of digital, ‘platformed’ literature complicated traditional assessments of the contemporary?
- Literary Form as a Marker of Contemporaneity: If, as with Georg Lukács, “art forms become subject to a historico-philosophical dialectic,” literary genres may be said to register shifts in world history at large. How, then, can we define the contemporary in literature vis-á-vis the most dominant political and social formations of the past couple of decades? If the contemporary is characterized by the connection between the socio-political status quo, a global neoliberal economy and their artistic representation, what exactly is the role of literature within or without this setting? Which texts and forms can be plausibly called contemporary and why? Is the contemporary nationally specific, and if yes, in how far does it still make sense to speak of contemporary American literature? How can we account for the particularity of singular life forms and identities represented in literary history – be they subnational, ethnic/racial, regional, or queer – without either reiterating a hackneyed cultural essentialism or giving up on the idea of the nation as such?
- Writing and Teaching Literary History: What would an approach to the contemporary as a literary period mean for the theory and practice of periodization that has come under strain at the very same time that this new period emerged? Can it be integrated into period-based models of literary history or would it ask us to give them up? And if so, what would this mean for the project of writing and teaching that history? Can we conceive of alternative models? Can we think about literary history outside the bounds of the period model? What would be the preconditions for doing so?
Abstracts of 300 words max. should be submitted electronically by December 1, 2025. Full essays of 10,000 words max. (including endnotes and references) are due on March 31, 2026 (submission instructions to follow). For assistance with the submission process, please contact submissions@post45.org. For inquiries about the content of the issue, please contact the co-editors: Laura Bieger (laura.bieger@ruhr-uni-bochum.de) and Philipp Löffler (philipp.loeffler@as.uni-heidelberg.de).